10:18am

Shots - Health Blog

'Calling My Children' And The Faces Of AIDS

Originally published on Sat February 2, 2013 10:06 am

By editor

David Binder

Photographer David Binder began documenting stories about AIDS in the late 1980s and became well known for humanizing the epidemic for various publications, including Life magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Over the course of 25 years, Binder has approached the subject from different angles: By spending time at Camp Sunburst, a program for families coping with AIDS; and with a former drug user turned activist, who started an underground needle-exchange program; and with a Playboy model struggling to live with the disease.

Binder's long-term documentation of Gail Farrow and her family deftly shattered readers' perception of the epidemic. Farrow, an African-American mother of four, contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, defying the stereotype that only prostitutes, homosexuals and drug users were vulnerable to infection. She died in 1989.

Calling My Children, Binder's documentary about Gail and her family, will be screened Wednesday night at the U.S. Capitol in conjunction with the 19th International AIDS Conference. Watch the video to hear Binder's own words about this moving body of work.